Information Technology (IT) administrators are facing new challenges due to a significant increase in the number of servers in an enterprise's IT infrastructure and the adoption of distributed electronic business applications. These challenges have resulted from: (1) a transition from client-server to Internet-based architectures, resulting in frequent interactions between different types of servers; and (2) the use of component application servers, such as J2EE (Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition) and .NET, to generate components, tools, systems, and complex application models. Faced with these challenges, an IT administrator may need to juggle hundreds of incompatible software application configurations and track thousands of server components for the thirty to forty servers he or she manages.
Currently available configuration tools are inadequate to manage a large number of software application configuration and server components across multiple servers in a heterogeneous computing environment. To manage and configure heterogeneous servers, particularly in the complex business computing infrastructure, many IT administrators use enterprise systems management (ESM) products offering monitoring tools to automate problem identification across multiple servers. However, these monitoring tools do not provide a centralized management system with a centralized configuration database, which can centrally keep track of current server components and their interdependencies across the different servers.
In addition, these ESM products provide little or no help in correcting or configuring server components in a heterogeneous computing environment. For UNIX and Linux operating system-based servers, despite the open-source and internally developed tools and scripts to handle simple configuration changes to J2EE configurations, neither the tools nor the scripts can be easily extended to address complex distributed applications.
Microsoft Window-based operating system servers are even more difficult to correct and configure than UNIX and Linux operating system based servers, due to a large number of server components having complex interdependencies. Although system management tools are available from Microsoft, they have been designed to target only small-scale homogenous Windows-based computing environments, and not the large and heterogeneous computing environment supporting multiple operating systems that most IT administrators have to manage.
Because of the inadequacies in currently available management tools, significant portions of any server configuration change operations have to be made manually by the IT administrator for each server. Accordingly, human errors can occur from these manual change operations, and from manual monitoring and tracking of each server's configuration, resulting in frequent server misconfigurations and system downtime.